Can't make it to Edinburgh for the festival this month? You can still catch it live at a screen near you.

Festival Revue, one of the most ambitious projects of last year's Edinburgh Festival, is again broadcasting live performances from a stage in Princes Street Gardens, simultaneously onto the Web, a dedicated cable television channel, and two huge video screens in Edinburgh.

In a further development, between August 19 and 29, with the support of BT Scotland, it will be piping footage down to a video screen in London's Covent Garden, a move expected to boost the festival audience by 1m.

"The whole ethos of what we're trying to do is to give the arts a platform to expose them in places where people wouldn't normally see them and perhaps inspire them to go and see a live act or a performance," says Paul Blyth, the man running Festival Revue.

Each day will consist of a nine- to 12-hour rolling program of around 40 live acts (mostly from the Fringe), video art, music videos and archive footage gathered from around the festival.

"It is the longest live broadcast in the world. It's like 23 telethons one after another," says Blyth. While the giant video screen in Covent Garden will shut down at 9pm (and a little later in Edinburgh), overnight viewers will have a second chance to catch the day's program on cable (Telewest's Channel 90) and the web (using Microsoft's Media Player).

Concerts by techno maestros, Orbital (August 13) and Nick Cave (27), scheduled in conjunction with the Flux Music Festival at www.fluxfestival.com, will have the telephone wires buzzing with activity, particularly since Festival Revue will be globally publicised through the Microsoft Network (MSN) chain of portals. The increased popularity is likely to negate the advances made in web video since last year -namely greater bandwidth and smarter video software that automatically adjusts to changes in your connection speed. However, as Blyth points out, you can always come back later.

The event is free but there will be advertising. "We don't have a huge amount of advertising. There's only a maximum of two minutes per 16 minutes," says Blyth. "To fill those advertising slots has not been easy because the concept is so new. Global advertising is not really something that a lot of companies and media buyers have got their heads around, but that will come."

Other developments are a bigger Edinburgh stage ("three times the size"), and higher resolution video screens. The Pixelite video screens, measuring 12 square metres, are a higher definition 10mm pixel pitch compared with the 40mm pixel pitch of last year.

Festival Revue has also recruited 28 presenters to steer the show, compared to last year's three.

Fringe companies have warmed to the project. "I think it's brilliant," says artistic director of the Assembly Rooms, William Burdett-Coutts. "In the future I don't see why there couldn't be a channel on the internet where people could plug in to what's going on at the festival."

The Assembly Rooms own site at www.observer-assembly.com, is one of a number that have sprung up this year around the festival. Burdett-Coutts, a confessed internet enthusiast, hopes to reach a wider audience for the current fund-raising campaign, as well as providing program information and an online gallery. "We're aiming to run reviews of shows and snippets of interviews with people each day of the festival," says Burdett-Coutts. Many of the sites for the official festivals like www.edinburghfestivals.co.uk have also had welcome makeovers this year reflecting the boom in internet use.

Even if you are not trying to find the Edinburgh Festival online, a small part of it may still find you. As part of their production, The Truth, theatre company Tall Stories sent out hundreds of emails from the fictitious character of the play, Emily Smith.

"The message we sent out said, 'If you forward it, good luck and true love will come to you'," says writer-director Toby Mitchell. "There's no nasty threat."

A copy of the message appears also on their website, "Please cut and paste the text below into an email and send it to everyone you know," it urges. Since it is only a month or so since the web site was built and the e-mails sent off, this is one that could wend its way to your mailbox long after the Edinburgh Festival has passed.